Hey, I know that I am supposed to hate Mamma Mia!. It has but a 54 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and virtually every responsible critic (i.e., the ones who actually write for newspapers and are edited), has lambasted it, the show it is based on, and ABBA, who provided the songs the story is built around.

Apparently derived from a 1966 comedy called Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, about three soldiers who converge on an Italian village where they have been sending upkeep money to good time girl Gina Lollobrigida for the daughter each thinks is his, Mamma Mia! attempts to integrate a bunch of divergent ABBA songs into a rather slight story. Slightly reworked, Mamma Mia! concerns Donna (Meryl Streep), an aging hippie who runs a broken down hotel on a Greek island. On the day of her daughter Sophie (the wide eyed Amanda Seyfried)’s wedding, the three men who could be her father all arrive together, at Sophie’s secret invitation. The trio are writer Bill (Stellan Skarsgard) who has his own yacht, architect Sam (Pierce Brosnan), and (secretly gay?) financier Harry (Colin Firth), a man with a musical bent. For some unclear reason, Donna has not wanted to acknowledge these men for over 20 years even though one of them is the dad, and so there is a succession of push-pull scenes as the foursome interact singingly, with Sophie’s mostly forgotten fiance causing a contrived fight over being left out of the secret in order to give him something to do.

Again, I know I am not supposed to say this, but Mamma Mia! has the exuberance you want out of a summer musical movie. It’s all about giggly girls conspiring to get men, and long lost friends are unable to greet each other without screaming, hopping up and down, and racing toward each other with the speed of greyhounds for a ritual round of hugs. It takes me back to summer fun movies of the ’60s such as Where the Boys Are. Subsequently there has been a long tradition of older women in the noonday sun, from Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine to Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun. Mamma Mia! takes these premises and settings and adds the exhilaration of ABBAs produced-to-the-teeth numbers and succeeds in winning over at least one viewer.

I missed the stage show, which is supposed to be horrible, and yet has proved resilient, but I love most ABBA songs (except for half the ones they put in this film). The movie is not supposed to work, for these reasons. In addition, the producers plucked the stage director Phyllida Lloyd, a neophyte film director, to re-stage and mis-stage the movie version in its cramped living quarters and narrow white-washed Greek alleys and stairways. The dances and songs don’t jump out at you as much as they could. Yet the film has a certain ABBA energized charm. I think one has to like bad musicals to appreciate Mama Mia!, musicals with a good heart that try too hard but don’t have much going for them in the first place, oddities such as Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, or the short-lived TV musicals such as Cop Rock or Viva Laughlin, which lasted two episodes). Seyfried acquits herself well as a story-song singer, and Streep appears to have a blast leaping up and down on beds and leading chorus lines of finger clicking villagers. You have to an appetite for the bad to enjoy, say Pierce Brosnan, who gamely joins in the frolics but who has a voice like a gravel truck unleashing its load down an iron funnel.

I daresay that Mamma Mia! is a better film, for all its numerous flaws, than Sex in the City, with all its over-excused flaws, including static, over-familiar characters trapped on a treadmill of audience expectation. Mamma Mia! unleashes its actors, and they have fun with their parts in a way the sexless Sex girls won’t or can’t.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.